i wonder if bare metal apps really matter all that much in the long run. it's usually something you do when a platform is young and feature-poor, but with time, these things tend to become more of burden than something useful

(feature-poor) well, while it's still very simple, doesn't have a lot of working drivers and protocols, etc. fwiw, i would consider M1 with RTEMS (when it works) to be already in a sufficiently mature state that you wouldn't be tempted to use standalone binaries anymore